Top 20 schools for the religious: New directory has the answers

Parents who fret over sending their kids off to college -- you know, whether they drink and hit on each other and lose their faith -- can ease their concerns with The 376 Best Colleges, a study produced by The Princeton Review.

The review, drawing from a 122,000-student survey, lines up the 20 colleges and universities with the most religious students -- as well as schools with the least. Religion is one of more than 60 categories on which the publication asked for student feedback.

The most religious is no surprise: Brigham Young University in Utah. The mammoth school of 30,000-plus students is run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon). The list also has Wheaton College, sometimes called the Harvard of Christian schools. You can also find Baylor and Notre Dame here. No schools in Florida, though.

By denomination, seven of the Top 20 religious schools are Catholic, three of them Jesuit. Six call themselves generally Christian, often adding the term "liberal arts." Other denominations represented include Christian Reform (Calvin) and Churches of Christ (Pepperdine).

Because the schools are rated on several measures, they turn up on more than one list. The other categories include the best dorms, professors, athletics, financial aid, the most conservative or liberal students, and the most "friendly" to lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transgendered people. There’s even a category for schools with the "happiest" students.

A caveat: The lists show a little bias. For instance, many of the top religious schools also showed up among the most "LBGT-unfriendly" schools. But the least religious schools were not called "religion-unfriendly." They were simply called "schools with the least religious students."

Not that the Princeton Review is necessarily anti-religious. It actually adds some interesting insights about religious studies in a 237-word essay. It argues that the major can work for several professions because classes are usually small. Religious studies also relate to many other fields, from anthropology to history to peace studies to sociology.

I especially liked this paragraph:

"Religion is central to all aspects of human life and it profoundly shapes the thought and values of its adherents. If you major in Religious Studies, you'll study the diverse myths, rituals, original texts, and moral systems of the world's many different religious traditions. Religious Studies, like other liberal arts majors, provides an extraordinary opportunity to think about the core beliefs of civilizations past and present."

One more tip from Princeton Review: Religious studies on your resume will catch the eye of employment interviewers. "They'll ask about it, and you'll get to impress them with your knowledge and insight about the world."

Oh yeah, the other side. Want to get away from religion? You have 20 options there, too. They include Bard, Vassar and Emerson in the Northeast, Pomona and the University of California at Santa Barbara in the West, Grinnell and Macalester in the Midwest. Student comments typically style the schools as creative, intellectual and socially engaged.